#3 - OCTOBER 2024
The three waves of digital automation
AI didn’t turn up out of the blue. Since the 1960s, digital automation has been profoundly changing the professional world
By Antoine Boitez
And in the 1960s, the first wave of digital automation started off the transformation of industrial processes. It saw the rise of robotic production and robotics in the cloud, and enabled robots to assemble parts faster and more accurately than manual workers. It mainly replaced the most routine tasks performed according to clearly-defined rules, as well as moderately skilled manual tasks. “This automation led to reduced production costs and increased productivity, but it also gave rise to concerns about job security for workers carrying out repetitive tasks,” says Luca Paltrinieri, a philosophy researcher who studies the issue of automation in the working world.
THE DIGITAL TRANSITION AND THE INTERNET:
THE SECOND STAGE OF THE ROCKET
The 1990s saw the second wave of automation: the digital transition and the boom in Internet services. The way companies were organised changed radically, giving rise to platform capitalism. “Uber and Deliveroo were two of the iconic companies of this period, managing their workers via apps. This change enabled greater flexibility for companies and workers alike, but also raised crucial questions about the nature of the work and the boundary between freedom and exploitation in the gig economy,” says Luca Paltrinieri. This model led to job insecurity, with the emergence of “unpaid digital work and mission-based micro-tasks”.
THE ARRIVAL OF AI AND DEEP LEARNING:
THE LAST STAGE OF THE ROCKET
The third wave broke in the 2010s, with artificial intelligence, automatic learning and deep learning. This era of automation is now targeting “higher value” and creative tasks. Algorithms can automate expert skills, and chatbots are beginning to replace human linguistic and empathic skills. Content creation, once an exclusively human domain, is being taken over more and more by generative AI. Tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 can write articles, stories and even computer code. This wave is pushing out the boundaries of automation even further, redefining creativity and competence.